MediaTek is making waves, again. The company’s flagship mobile system-on-chip (SoC)—Helio X20—is up against rivals like Apple, Qualcomm and Samsung, according to leaked Geekbench scores, and is leading in some of the performance benchmarks.… Read More
Enabling the Ecosystem for True Heterogeneous 3D IC DesignsThe demand for higher performance, greater configurability, and…Read More
Why I Think Intel 3.0 Will SucceedProbably one of the most anticipated semiconductor investor…Read More
Griffin Securities’ Jay Vleeschhouwer on EDA Acquisitions and StartupsJay Vleeschhouwer, Managing Director of Software Research at…Read More
Security Coverage: Assuring Comprehensive Security in Hardware DesignAs hardware systems become increasingly complex and security…Read More
Scaling 3D IC Technologies – Siemens Hosts a Meeting of the Minds at DAC3D IC was a very popular topic at…Read More
How Not To Be Incoherent
The advantage of working with cache memory is the great boost in performance you can get from working with a local high-speed copy of chunks of data from main memory. The downside is that you are messing with a copy; if another processor happens to be working in a similar area, there is a danger you can get out of sync when reading and writing… Read More
mbed OS abstraction battles IoT hyperfragmentation
In the days of bit banging and single-threaded loops, programming a microcontroller meant grabbing a C compiler (or even before that, an assembler) and some libraries and writing bare metal code. High performance networking and multi-tasking was usually the purview of heavier real-time operating systems (RTOS) or, if an MMU… Read More
PUF the Magic (IoT) Dragon
Most people are familiar with Biometrics, the measurement of unique physical characteristics, such as fingerprints, and facial features, for the purpose of verifying human identity with a high level of certainty. The iris and even a person’s electrocardiogram (ECG) can be used as a secure biometric identifier.… Read More
2016 – Intelligent Things of the Internet
Change is happening fast with the Internet of Things (IoT). Devices are getting smarter. We all know that and have seen the evolution over the last several years – from smart thermostats to toasters. But smartness is a relative term and as we enter 2016 we will see more devices/machines that are becoming intelligent. And when… Read More
The Silicon Valley Apocalypse!
Based on the Behavioral Sink Experiments in the 1950s it is hard for me to believe that Silicon Valley will continue with the unicorn fueled hyper expansion we are currently experiencing without some very serious repercussions, both social and financial. First let’s talk about the social issues which to me are the most interesting.… Read More
Lighting Up The Cloud
In our rush to imagine a world populated with IoT devices, tech advances at the top end of this ecosystem (the cloud) don’t seem to get much airtime. But this isn’t because they are limited to modest refinements. As one example, there is active technology development in connectivity around fiber-based communications within the… Read More
Tuning Analog IP for High Yield at SMIC
Analog IP is more difficult to design and optimize for a given process node compared to digital IP, so any automation for analog designers is always welcome. The engineers at SMIC in China have customers that design analog IP and often they need to know how to optimize it for a specific process, so I watched a presentation by Josh Yang,… Read More
IEDM Blogs – Part 5 – Intel and Micron 3D NAND
At IEDM Intel and Micron presented “A Floating Gate Based 3D NAND Technology With CMOS Under Array” authored by Krishna Parat and Chuck Dennison.
As I previously discussed in my blog on the IEDM memory short course and blog on IMEC’s work on high mobility 3D NAND channels, continuing to scale 2D Flash has become extremely difficult… Read More
IEDM Blogs – Part 4 – IMEC InGaAs Channel for 3D NAND
At IEDM IMEC presented “MOCVD In[SUB]1-x[/SUB]Ga[SUB]x[/SUB]As high mobility channel for 3-D NAND Memory” authored by E. Capogreco, J. G. Lisoni, A. Arreghini, A. Subirats, B. Kunert, W. Guo, T. Maurice, C.-L. Tan, R. Degraeve, K. De Meyer, G. Van den bosch, and J. Van Houdt.
On December 15[SUP]th[/SUP] I had the opportunity … Read More
Musk’s new job as Samsung Fab Manager – Can he disrupt chip making? Intel outside